Rãzboiul rece ( The Cold War ), Natiunile Unite ( UN ), Harry Truman O Scurtã Istorie a Statelor Unite ( 1 )

Rãzboiul rece ( The Cold War ), Natiunile Unite ( UN ), Harry Truman:

O Scurtã Istorie a Statelor Unite ( 1 )

We must build a new world, a far better world -- one in which the eternal dignity of man is respected.” – Harry S. Truman

The Successor to Roosevelt in the White House was momentarily overwhelmed by the weight of his responsibilities ; but only momentarily.

Harry S. Truman had qualities of decision, self-confidence, and determination that belied his colorless personal appearance.

Our second President from west of Mississippi, he had been reared in western Missouri with a rural background and high-school education.

His experience had been varied : bank clerk, farmer, artillery officer in France during the First World War, haberdasher, Kansas City politician, judge ( actually  a county administrative officer ), and finally United States Senator.

In the Senate he had supported the New Deal, taken special interest in farm and labor legislation, and during his second term achieved national  prominence as the efficient chairman of a special committee investigating defense expenditures.

His nomination for the vice-presidency had disappointed several Democrats who thought they had better claims, including Henry Wallace and James F. Byrnes.

Truman partly consoled the first by keeping him as Secretary of Commerce, and the second by presently appointing him Secretary of State.

Events soon proved that Truman had remarkable qualifications for not only national but international leadership.

In small matters, to be sure, he blundered, making some poor appointments, standing by old friends after they betrayed his trust, and uttering various irresponsible offhand statements.

His speeches lacked eloquence and his written papers elegance ; it was in rough-and-ready talks of the political-rally, rear-platform variety that he excelled.

He tended to oversimplify current situations, and often let partisanship get the better of his judgement.

But he possessed a clear and decisive mind ; he was better educated than many Presidents, for he had read widely, especially in American history ; he had a passion for democracy, and as deep a conviction as Wilson or Franklin D. Roosevelt that the United States must be its energetic guardian in world affairs.

Few Presidents have been so industrious ; over long stretches he worked sixteen hours a day.

He believed fervently in action and leadership.

And when crises came, this peaceable-looking man rose with instant decision and fierce fighting power to meet them.

On his accession to power in April, 1945, fighting in Europe was almost ended, and peace in Asia was only four months distant.

A vast complex of postwar problems, however, loomed ahead.

They proved all the more difficult because they were temporarily underrated.

As after the First World War, Americans talked too readily of a new age in world affairs, placed too much faith in the machinery of collective security, and showed a reckless alacrity in bringing the soldiers home and easing economic controls.

Most people thought Uncle Sam could soon turn to home concerns alone.

They were to be rudely disillusioned.                                                

Truman himself shared briefly in the rash optimism.

He yielded to the pressure for “normalcy” by rashly signing a paper which halted lend-lease shipments so abruptly as to injure and deeply offend some of our allies.

He responded to the demands of business conservatives by terminating most price controls.

Both steps he almost immediately regretted.

His administration began demobilizing with precipitate zeal and divested some European areas of troops who should have stayed there.

More happily, he also helped complete the work of building the United Nations as a permanent agency of international co-operation.

If America expected rather too much from the UN, it at least assisted in giving that body a power for good which it had refused to give the Leagues of Nations.

The country had learned a lesson since Wilson’s day.

The United Nations

The UN had begun as an alliance against Germany, Italy, and Japan which eventually numbered sixty countries.

In the midst of the conflict ( October, 1943 ) the foreign ministers of the United States, Britain, and Russia ( joined later by Nationalist China ) had signed an agreement to convert this alliance into a permanent body.

Congress had strongly supported this undertaking, a former Republican isolationist, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, helping to lead the way.

Then in the late summer of 1944, a gathering of experts met at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, and hammered out the main framework of the proposed UN Charter.

In most respects it was a simplified and strengthened version of the League.

A Security Council was to shoulder the main burden of maintaining world concord ; an Assembly was to offer a wide forum for complaint and discussion ; a World Court was to adjudicate proper questions ; and a Secretary-General and staff were to serve in a variety of ways.

The Council was to have five permanent members – America, Britain, Russia France, and China – and six others chosen for two-year terms by the Assembly.

Any permanent member of the Council could veto its measures.

The first great occurrence of the Truman administration was the session of the UN Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, beginning April 25, 1945, to debate the Dumbarton Oaks plan.

The forty-eight nations represented divided into three main groups : Russia, the great Western Powers, and certain small Western nations led by Australia.

Russia played a generally obstructive role, trying to extend the veto and to keep the UN too weak to interfere seriously with an aggressor ; her hope was to use it to confuse and divide the world.

Molotov, the Russian foreign minister, also stubbornly but unsuccessfully opposed the entry of Argentina as a member.

The main Western Powers, with Anthony Eden the principal British spokesman, and E. R. Stettinius, Harold Stassen, and Vandenberg the chief American representatives, labored earnestly to make the UN a strong and honest instrument for peace.

The Australian foreign minister, Herbert Evatt, was a doughty champion of the minor nations, which wished it even stronger than it became.

The conference finally decided that while the permanent Council members might veto action on substantive or concrete issues between nations, they could not veto “procedural” discussion on the means of taking them up.

This decision helped to strengthen the UN as a forum where world opinion might be aired and exterted.

Senate action on the UN was prompt and decisive.

The Charter was ratified by a vote of 89 to 2.

This accurately reflected public feeling on the question, and when the UN chose its permanent home in New York City overlooking the East River, American interest and approval became greater than ever.

Indeed, some observers later complained that many Americans thought the United Nations an American rather than a world agency !

Isolationism was by no means dead, but it was everywhere on the defensive.

The country understood at last that war anywhere menaces all nations everywhere and that peace is indivisible.

( Extras din A Short History of The United States by Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, Fifth Edition, Revised and Enlarged, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968 )